[Ardour-Users] Could this solve Ardour's financial headache?

[Petter Sundlöf]

Honestly I think this would seriously hinder any and much of future 
contributions and feedback from regular users.
At least going to myself, there wouldn't have been a chance in hell that 
I would have gotten involved (inso much as I am involved).
And in my opinion, Ardour is in desperate need of -- now more than ever 
actually, given all its new and coming (rhythm ferret, rubberband, MIDI) 
capabilities -- rigorous testing of all various features. A lot of 
broken stuff can still go unchecked into releases because of lack of 
time for testing.

Den 2009-01-07 16:47, John Emmas skrev:
> Only this morning I found out that Subversion is able to restrict access
> using a password database (rather than 'anonymous' access which is the
> default). Obviously, something like this must already happen for write
> access but I gather it can be implemented for read access too. I couldn't
> help wondering if this might offer a solution for Ardour's ongoing
> financial
> dilemma...?
>
> According to various things I've read during the past year, monthly
> downloads for Ardour are typically between 10,000 and 20,000 downloads per
> month - although it's thought that most of these might just be existing
> users keeping themselves up-to-date. Also, I'm not sure how that splits
> between people downloading the source and people downloading binaries, For
> the sake of argument, let's say that 500 "new" users download the source,
> each month (i.e. 2.5% - 5% of the total).
>
> If anyone wanting to download the source had to pay a one-time fee of $35,
> that would be a big chunk of income for Ardour each month. For their $35
> they'd get a password to use for future SVN access (which would be free
> from
> then onwards). People could still obtain binaries for free - and they could
> obtain source code for free (in a tar ball or whatever) - but SVN access
> would carry a one-off registration fee.
>
> Ideally it would need to be an automated process because I'm sure Paul's
> got
> enough to do already without having to issue 500 passwords every month.
> Also, there'd need to be some way of accommodating the existing user base,
> so they don't find themselves suddenly out in the cold.
>
> In the early days (when Ardour wasn't as feature-rich and there probably
> wasn't enough interest in it) I can see how something like this would have
> been counter-productive. But given that Ardour is more mature and is
> steadily gaining in popularity, is this now something worth thinking about?
>
> John
>
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